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What is The Sacred Feminine?

WHAT IS THE SACRED FEMININE?

I find my path in life is always taking surprising directions, yet there is a constant theme of “I Am Mother” and the Sacred Feminine. It has only become more apparent in the past year and a half, during my studies at Cedar Crest College in Art Therapy. But what does the “Sacred Feminine” mean? Or when someone says the divine feminine is the way to healing and enlightenment? Is it a Christian concept? Buddhist? Pagan? Wiccan? New Age? Is it even tied to religion? Or is it a spiritual concept?

The answer is simple. The divine feminine is the goddess in all traditions, and has been since the beginning of time. These traditions are a mystical, magical, powerful, part of primal Mother Earth. They symbolize balance and healing, renewal and restoration. The feminine principle is one of nurturing love, acceptance, understanding, compassion, insight, intuition, creativity, forgiveness, healing and wisdom. Whatever your beliefs and choice of traditions are, whether She appears to you as Ishtar or Mari, Gaia or Quan Yin, as the great Mother Mary or Magdalene, or as one of the pantheon of goddesses from ancient Egypt or Greece or Rome, to Africa or the Middle East, to the cults of the Black Madonna, or whether she is spun from one of the archetypes of the indigenous tribes, such as Spider Woman, the divine feminine is still the primordial She who creates from a central source.

The sacred feminine is a the term we use for that mysterious source of all life, the wellspring of creation. The big She. The feminine force that births both male and female forms. The circle that contains both yin and yang. The portal between the worlds. She is by nature indefinable, yet her presence has been experienced so tangibly by peoples of the earth from the beginning of time, that She has been honoured and deified in many forms as bringer of life, growth, decline, death and rebirth by many ancient cultures.The Goddess is our primary life force on the planet. If we don’t utilize the love, nurturing, understanding, and kindness of the divine feminine within all of us, we will not survive. We need this essence to return balance to our world, our bodies, and our lives.

The Divine Feminine is this unseen dimension of soul to which we are connected through our instincts, our feelings, and the longing imagination of our heart. Soul is not limited to our own psychic life. Soul is invisible nature, the immense web of relationships that is concealed beneath the veil of matter. It is something both inconceivable and immeasurable to which we belong, in which we live – an intermediate dimension between our physical world and the deep unknowable ground of being.

The Divine Mother is asking us to trust and protect life, to work with her in all we do, opening our understanding to the knowledge that we are not separate from herself but an expression of her being. The unknown dimension of soul is our conduit to the Divine. Cut off from soul, the mind becomes impoverished, rigid, dogmatic, and inflated. In compensation for this loss of relationship with soul, it becomes driven by the need for ever more power and control. The journey in search of the unknown dimension of soul, back the way we have come, toward nature and the ground of our own nature, is difficult and even dangerous because it asks that we relinquish the certainty of deeply held beliefs, both religious and scientific. It means opening ourselves to discovery. The Sacred Feminine is urging us to open our minds to a new vision of reality, a revelation of all cosmic life as a divine unity. For those awakened to this vision, to be born a human being is not to be born into a fallen, flawed world of sin and illusion, cut off from the divine; it is to be born into a world lit by an invisible radiance, ensouled by Divine Presence, graced and sustained by incandescent light and love.